An employee of a Hong Kong multinational has been trapped by scammers. Believing to witness a videoconferencing with his superior, and at the request of the latter, the person concerned made payments for a total of 25 million dollars… except that all the speakers at the meeting were in reality deepfakes.
“ They all seemed real “. This is what the employee of a multinational based in Hong Kong said after being fooled by scammers during a video conference. Certain of obeying the orders of his financial director during the meeting, the employee in question made several payments for a total amount of 25 million dollars (200 million Hong Kong dollars). However, the person concerned was in reality the only human present at this meeting. The other participants, including his superior? Deepfakes, which it seems difficult to protect against, are created by an AI in such a way as to make the scam possible.
A deepfake that was expensive…
“ During this video conference with several participants, it turned out that everyone except him was fake, but seemed larger than life », Commented Chan Shun-ching, chief superintendent at the microphone of the Hong Kong channel RTHK. As reported by BFMTV, the targeted employee therefore made around fifteen transactions in good faith to five different bank accounts.
According to investigators, the scam was the work of professionals. To generate convincing deepfakes, they downloaded videos of employees of the multinational in question over many months, in order to train their AI.
High-flying crooks
The employee who was the victim of the scam had received an email invitation to the meeting apparently emanating from his director, based in Great Britain. It was actually a fake email. This phishing attempt, however, bore fruit thanks to the presence of colleagues known to the employee during the meeting… these were nevertheless generated via AI, without which the scam would probably never have succeeded.
However, the trapped employee did not realize the scam until it was too late, when he contacted his colleagues after the meeting. Note that the use of deepfakes for this type of scam is not a first. Already in 2019, the same method allowed crooks to push the manager of the British subsidiary of a German firm to pay 220,000 euros into a Hungarian account.
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Source : BFMTV
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